Adam Hays: Tsuchigumo Progression

By Adam Hays
This might be of interest to a few of you who like to paint in watercolor. It’s my preferred medium as I suck with most others. I did a painting of the giant Earth spider Tsuchigumo recently for the Gomineko book project of Japanese creatures. It’s from it’s moment of death when the belly of the beast was sliced open spilling a lifetime of skulls along with hundreds of baby spiders. Cool story…

I tried to take a photo every night or whenever I was about to start a new stage in the progression. You can kind of see my process in layering my colors. Most of this is Dr. Martens Hydrus and concentrated watercolor. There’s a little FW liquid acrylic in there too. All the black is Speedball ink. It’ was my first time trying that brand of ink in a painting and I had mixed results. I tried out a different kind of paper for this one much to my disliking.

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I used Reeves BFK on this for it’s smooth texture. It’s like a heavy linen hot press paper. I really struggled with it. It was great to line the design 0n but the concentrated watercolor would bleed like crazy. I really had problems getting the stuff to stay where I put it. Somewhere through the process I switched to Hydrus and the thicker paint with the pigment in it didn’t run nearly as bad. Suffice it to say I won’t be using that paper again for this kind of project. Have a look. If you’re on Facebook I’d love some feedback there as I’ve turned off comments on my site due to too much fucking spam.

I’ve also got a few prints of this… E-mail me if you’re interested: losttex@gmail.com

Adam Hays is a tattooer and blogger for Tattoo Artist Magazine. Adam can be found at Red Rocket Tattoo in NYC… or on a Rebel base in the Hoth System…